Topics are the basic building block of a Foswiki site. You may be more familiar with the term pages, documents or articles in other software; however, Foswiki's topics traditionally serve more purposes than the equivalent in other systems. Topics can only exist inside a web. The topic you're reading now is TopicsAndWebs.

A Web is a collection of topics (and other webs, known as subwebs). Webs are containers and by themselves cannot store information; only topics can do that. You may be more familiar with the term Namespaces in other wiki software, but Foswiki's webs are more like directories and folders in your computer's operating system. There is no common "root" web. The TopicsAndWebs topic you're reading now is contained in the System web (its complete, fully qualified name is System.TopicsAndWebs).

Anatomy of a Topic

Each topic has:

name

topics in a given web have unique names to identify them

topics with a WikiWord name are automatically linked (as opposed to [[forced bracketed links]] - see WikiSyntax to learn more)

Create a link to the topic which doesn't exist yet, e.g. by editing a topic and typing a WikiName. When the topic is saved, the link will be shown with a ?: click the ? and a new edit window appears.

Navigate to the topic which doesn't exist yet, e.g. by typing the name of topic in the JumpBox. Foswiki should display a screen which invites you to create the topic.

Click the Create New Topic link in the WebLeftBar links down the left side of the page (assuming default PatternSkin). Foswiki should display a screen which invites you to create the topic.

Topic Names

The best strategy is to use WikiWords for your topic names. In this way, linking is automatic. However, if non-WikiWord names are required, you can use [[bracketed links]] to force a link to a non-standard topic name (see WikiSyntax). Forced links are subject to some restrictions and the actual topic name may not be identical to what was entered into the forced link.

The first letter of each "word" will be automatically capitalized

Spaces are compressed out of the topic name

The following special characters are removed:

Any other "whitespace" characters

* (Asterisk)

? (Question mark)

~ (Tilde)

^ (Caret / Circumflex)

\ (Backslash)

$ (Dollar-sign)

@ (At-sign)

% (Percent-sign)

`'" Quotes (Open-quote, Close-quote/Apostrophe, and Double-quote)

& (Ampersand)

; (Semicolon)

| (Vertical line)

<> (Less and Greater signs)

[] (Open and close square brackets)

And any ASCII control characters (Hex x00-x1f)

Example: If you enter [[my special-topic @here]], you will see my special-topic @here, but the actual topic created will be MySpecial-topicHere.

Note that if you use the Topic Creator, WikiWord rules are strictly enforced and the resulting topic name would be MySpecialTopicHere For more details on forced links, see EditingShorthand

The naming rules may be different for your installation; ask the wiki administrator who may have customised the {NameFilter} expert option under Security and Authentication in configure

it is possible in Foswiki to have a subweb which is the same name as a topic. For this reason, if there is a web named Sandbox/MySubWeb, navigating to it must be done so using a trailing slash, i.e. Sandbox/MySubWeb/. Without the trailing slash, Foswiki tries to display the topic named Sandbox.MySubWeb